In my last stint of unemployment, I watched the last MicroSoft Developers conference live and was stuck once again by how future forward the company is. The future is, apparently, chat bots. Living in Los Angeles, you can kind of get beaten down by all the Apple fanatics hyping everything from their favorite company as “the new hotness” when, in fact, they are three steps behind MicroSoft and Google. But I digress…

I was fascinated by the learning chat bots they introduced (though their Twitter experiment was a disaster). They seem like a great way to automate some basic customer interactions until a human needs to step in. A lot of tasks need human intervention – tech doesn’t get your company out of having employees.

Since I wasn’t doing anything but looking for a job, I decided to take a few minutes to set up my own Twitter not as an experiment. I used a tutorial that didn’t require much coding just to see how quickly it could be done. Including creating the base account on Twitter (and all the annoyances that entails), it took me a little over an hour to set up and start the bot tweeting.

The spreadsheet method worked really well so I thought I would add some more features by pulling in another service. I set up the other service on the same Twitter account to retweet everything with the word “Frankenstein” in it. I should have known this would get the account locked – there are TONS of tweets with that word in it. Lo and behold – shortly after setting up, the account was locked. Its up and running again now but I didn’t notice for a bit. Oops…

Go follow Shelly Bot for random bits of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.